thanks for this. very handy to have.
The program eventually got broke by the changes BBC made to iplayer itself. This seemed to be about the same time as they introduced the forced sign-in.
Another effect was that iplayer stopped working altogether on my Samsung telly which was a right pain.
Thankfully the excellent open source community have managed to work around the BBC changes and have restored get_iplayer to its former glory. If you haven't already, you therefore need to download the latest version from the Git Hub link above.
There is now a warning about having a TV license and I find that the program detects my VPN and won't download even if I am connected to a UK based server.
Other than that there don't seem to be any fundamental changes to the way it works, although I notice that the highest quality version is selected by default now so the 'modes' command should not be necessary.
Another handy feature is the option to give a comma separated list of two or more pid codes to download several programs one after another - great if your internet is shite as you can leave it chuntering away if you are out/asleep.